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Thursday, February 19, 2015

How
many authors could title their book simply World
Order without sounding utterly presumptuous? Henry Kissinger still
plays in a league of his own. For admirers and critics alike, he is more than
just a former U.S. secretary of state and previous national security adviser.
Some see him as the quintessential wise man of U.S. foreign policy; others, as
a diehard realpolitiker hanging on to yesterday’s world; and still others, as a
perennial bête noire. To all, he remains larger than life. And regardless of how
one views Kissinger, his new book is tremendously valuable.

To
call World Order
timely would be an understatement, for if there was one thing the world yearned
for in 2014, it was order. In the Middle East, the Syrian civil war has killed
hundreds of thousands and allowed jihadist groups to threaten the stability of
the entire region. In Asia, an economically resurgent China has grown more
assertive, stoking anxiety among its neighbors. In West Africa, the Ebola
pandemic has nearly shut down several states. And even Europe, the most
rule-bound and institutionalized part of the world, has seen its cherished
liberal norms come under direct assault as Russian President Vladimir Putin
reclaimed military aggression as an instrument of state policy.

Even
more ominous, the traditional guardians of global order seem to have become
reluctant to defend it. Following long, costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
the United States and other Western powers are suffering from intervention
fatigue, preferring instead to focus on domestic concerns. And the rising
powers have so far proved either unwilling or unable to safeguard international
stability.

Enter
Kissinger. A strategist and historian by training, he takes the long view. The
core of the book is his exploration of different interpretations of the idea of
world order and competing approaches to constructing it. Kissinger opens the
book by defining the term “world order” as “the concept held by a region or
civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of
power thought to be applicable to the entire world.” As he is quick to point
out, any system of this kind rests on two components: “a set of commonly
accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of
power that enforces restraint where rules break down, preventing one political
unit from subjugating all others.”

Kissinger’s
world, it turns out, is not just about power derived from economic wealth and
military might but also about the power of ideas—although for him, the ideas
that matter most are those of the powerful. In his view, traditional notions
such as sovereignty and non­interference still reign supreme, having buttressed
the international system for almost four centuries. Today that system is very
much in flux, however, as powerful actors promote alternative ways to order it,
from theocracy to autocratic capitalism to borderless postmodernity. But only
the prevailing structure, Kissinger argues, fulfills the two main objectives of
world order: legitimacy and a balance of power. Among the book’s many messages,
then, perhaps the clearest of all is a warning: do not dispose of an organizing
principle if there exists no ready alternative that promises to be just as
effective.

WESTPHALIA
2.0

For
Kissinger, today’s international system owes its overall resilience to the
astuteness of seventeenth-century European statesmen. The modern state system
emerged in 1648 after a century of sectarian conflict, when the bitter Thirty
Years’ War brought together representatives of the European powers to establish
the Peace of Westphalia. The treaties they concluded codified the idea of
sovereign states as the building blocks of international order. A century and a
half later, at the Congress of Vienna, in 1814–15, diplomats such as the French
envoy Talleyrand and the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich
explicitly spelled out the principle of balance of power as a way of managing
the international system. In recounting these events, Kissinger is on his home
turf. Although some contemporary historians and political scientists might
object to his idealization of Westphalian institutions, one of Kissinger’s
gifts is a knack for revealing the relevance of historic structures to
present-day politics.

There
are limitations to that exercise, of course: Western ideas about states and
politics have been foisted on other regions ever since colonial times, and they
still compete with other, older visions of order and power that cannot be
ignored. This is particularly true in the Middle East. Thus, the book examines
the enduring impact of the Shiite-Sunni schism on the contemporary Muslim world
and the emergence of secular states there after the Westphalian system expanded
beyond Europe. Today, the regional order—still composed of European-style
nation-states—is threatened by transnational political Islam, in the form of
both political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadist groups
such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. The
latter’s rise illustrates a new danger, according to Kissinger: a
“disintegration of statehood into tribal and sectarian units” that risks
tipping the region into “a confrontation akin to—but broader than—Europe’s
pre-Westphalian wars of religion.”

Kissinger’s
survey of the Middle East also takes in the relationship between the United
States and Iran, a rivalry that pits the putative guardian of the liberal world
order against a state that has deliberately placed itself outside of that
system. Kissinger traces the tradition of Iranian statecraft back to the
Persian empire, emphasizing how Iran has always aspired to be more than just a
normal state in the Westphalian sense, struggling to “decide whether it is a
country or a cause.” This tradition heavily influences multilateral
negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Kissinger suggests that the United
States should foster cooperative relations with Iran based on the principle of
nonintervention. Where constructive diplomacy is not enough, however, the
United States should employ balance-of-power politics to cajole Iran into
cooperation, using alliances with the region’s Sunni powers as leverage. The
outcome of
Washington’s current attempt at rapprochement with Tehran might determine
“whether Iran pursues the path of revolutionary Islam
or that
of a great nation legitimately and importantly lodged in the Westphalian
system of states.”

Asia
is another region where Western concepts of world order have long competed with
indigenous visions. Even the very idea of an Asian region is itself something
of a Western import: prior to the arrival of modern Western powers in the
fifteenth century, none of the region’s many languages had a word for Asia, and
their speakers shared little sense of belonging to a single continent.
Kissinger pays particular attention to China and goes to great lengths to
distill the traditional Chinese worldview, which posited that the country was
not one power center among many but the “sole sovereign government of the
world,” where the Chinese emperor ruled over “all under heaven.” According to
Kissinger, the rise of China in the twenty-first century comes with refrains of
these traditional views, as Beijing searches for a synthesis between its
ancient tradition and its new role “as a contemporary great power on
the Westphalian model.” He warns that China and the United States hold
incompatible views on democracy and human rights but stresses that the two
countries share a common interest in avoiding conflict. Indeed, World Order
suggests that U.S.-Chinese relations may be less risky than China’s relations
with its Asian neighbors. East Asia, he reminds readers, is a region where
“nearly every country considers itself to be ‘rising,’ driving
disagreements to the edge of confrontation.”

RULES
OF ENGAGEMENT

Kissinger
is at his most interesting when considering the country he knows best: the
United States. World
Order offers some pointed commentary on the current debate in
Washington over the United States’ proper role in the world. But Kissinger is
no mere pundit, and his analysis rests on a deep exploration of two competing
strands of thought that have historically shaped U.S. foreign policy: the
pragmatic realism of President Theodore Roosevelt and the liberal idealism of
President Woodrow Wilson.

Although
Kissinger sometimes couches his views in abstract terms, it is easy to
comprehend what he thinks of President Barack Obama’s critics, who blame the
president for not offering enough leadership. Pointing to a number of wars with
far-reaching goals that the United States first waged and then had to abandon
midstream, Kissinger does not hide his skepticism over idealistic enterprises
that fail to recognize the limits of U.S. power, leading to disappointments, if
not full-fledged foreign policy disasters. “Critics will ascribe these setbacks
to the deficiencies, moral and intellectual, of America’s leaders,” he writes.
“Historians will probably conclude that they derived from the inability to
resolve an ambivalence about force and diplomacy, realism and idealism, power
and legitimacy, cutting across the entire society.”

Even
though Kissinger strongly takes the side of restraint in the ongoing tug of war
between the Rooseveltian and Wilsonian impulses in U.S. foreign policy, he
acknowledges the important role that liberal values play, too. “America would
not be true to itself if it abandoned this essential idealism,” he writes. And
although he recognizes Washington’s special role as a defender of Western
norms, Kissinger also emphasizes that “world order cannot be achieved by any
one country acting alone.” The European powers remain the United States’ most
natural partners, and Kissinger stresses that they all are best served when
they cultivate their relationship, working not only to maximize the overall
level of Western influence in world affairs but also to restrain one another’s
worst impulses.

Kissinger
is certainly right to warn of the excessive self-righteousness that democracies
sometimes demonstrate. But he is perhaps too skeptical of some more recent
forms of liberal internationalism. He argues, for example, that the
“responsibility to protect” doctrine—which holds that a state forfeits its
sovereign right to noninterference if it fails to protect its population from
mass atrocities, requiring the international community to act on this
population’s behalf—could destabilize the international system. But liberal
societies devised this principle in order to prevent ruthless leaders from
manipulating and making a mockery of Westphalian norms in their efforts to
escape punishment for abusing their own people. On balance, applying the
doctrine properly would do more to protect the liberal order than to undermine
it.

Although
he might take issue with such thinking, Kissinger acknowledges that it will
become increasingly difficult for Western democracies to pursue policies that
undercut their basic commitment to liberal values. And he points out that
long-term stability based on oppression is an illusion, as the Arab revolts of
2011 demonstrated. The coming decades will see plenty of argument over this
basic dilemma, as Western powers weigh how much liberalism is too much—or too
little.

A
WHOLE NEW WORLD?

As
far as Kissinger is concerned, nation-states are still the main players in the
international system. Neither international institutions nor nonstate actors
play an important role in his book. In this view, not all that much has changed
since 1814, when the European powers convened in Vienna to forge a sustainable
system that, minor outbreaks of violence aside, preserved peace on the
continent for a century. Nor is today much different from 1914, when the same
major powers drove Europe over the cliff, unleashing a major war that became
the first truly global conflict. Kissinger’s notes of caution, repeated
throughout the book, serve as a warning for those who think that humanity has
nearly overcome the old patterns of power politics and state rivalry.

That
message is particularly pertinent for the EU, whose most enthusiastic
cheerleaders promote it as the vanguard of a borderless, post-Westphalian
world. The EU has without a doubt fundamentally transformed Europe: rising
right-wing nationalism notwithstanding, young people in EU states tend to
identify with both their home countries and the union as a whole. However, it
would be imprudent and dangerous to expect the rest of the world to eagerly
follow Europe’s lead. Although regional integration projects are advancing
elsewhere, the breadth and depth of the European experience may remain unique.
Europe, the birthplace of the Westphalian model, might be ready to move on. But
the rest of the world isn’t—and, Kissinger argues, that’s for the best. As he
puts it, “Westphalian principles are, at this writing, the sole generally
recognized basis of what exists of a world order.”

But
Kissinger is fully aware that the international system is influenced by factors
other than great-power politics and that there are other powerful sources of
order and disorder—most notably the global economy, the environment, and
technological change. However, some of these factors take a secondary role in
Kissinger’s work.

The
broad reach of globalization and the resulting degree of complex
interdependence come with new challenges. For instance, the spread of
capitalism and free trade has lifted millions out of poverty but has also
generated unsustainable degrees of inequality. And the economic interdependence
produced by globalization acts as both a stabilizing and a disruptive force,
encouraging growth but also expanding the reach of economic shocks. Such
interdependence has changed the politics of coercion, as Western states now
commonly use their economic power to force other countries to comply with
international rules. This strategy might not always produce good results, but
it has brought Iran back to the negotiating table and remains the only option
the West has available for pressuring Russia to change course in
Ukraine.

World
order will also be subject to climate change, a phenomenon that is largely
man-made but that lies outside policymakers’ control. It is too late to prevent
climate change from affecting the lives of billions of people—a fact that can
cut both ways when it comes to global stability. An environmental catastrophe
could bring the world together, just as the devastation of World War II
compelled countries to forge a more durable international system, create the
United Nations, and establish the Bretton Woods institutions, which have
functioned fairly well since 1944. Alternatively, a climate crisis could
magnify existing tensions, undermine global governance, and further erode the
capacity of weak states to responsibly administer their own territories.

When
it comes to technological change, it is obvious that Kissinger does not feel
completely comfortable in this brave new world. He recognizes that the Internet
has enabled many of the contemporary era’s great achievements, but he faults it
for giving rise to a less substantive, more cursory way of thinking about the
world’s true complexity. “Knowledge of history and geography is not essential
for those who can evoke their data with the touch of a button,” Kissinger
writes. “The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident
to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on
Facebook.” He likens today’s digital optimists—those who believe that
cyberspace can solve the world’s most pressing problems—to the naive Wilsonian
idealists of a century ago.

Younger
analysts tend to have a different view, of course. And although Kissinger’s
skepticism is well intentioned and not unjustified, it is indisputable that new
technologies have already fundamentally changed the practice of diplomacy and
statesmanship. Today’s diplomats must be prepared to speak to a global audience
and to constantly contend with an international media circus. They must be both
hard-nosed negotiators and global communicators: tweeting Talleyrands, ready to
defend their interests in the real world and the virtual world alike. Most
notably, recent cyberattacks and hybrid warfare have demonstrated that
cyberspace has already become a battlefield on which familiar concepts such as
deterrence and even defense need to be defined anew.

Kissinger’s
secret wish might be to stage a Congress of Vienna for the twenty-first
century. And although world politics is complicated by a host of factors that
don’t fit easily into the Westphalian model—transnational identities, digital
hyperconnectivity, weapons of mass destruction, global terrorist
networks—Kissinger is still right to insist that the management of
great-power relations remains of paramount importance. Indeed, there should not
need to be another Thirty Years’ War to provide the impetus for a new
Westphalian peace and a world order that is at once legitimate and reflective
of the new geopolitical realities. Kissinger’s book is a gift to all of those
who care about global order and seek to stave off conflict in the twenty-first
century. No one else could have produced this masterpiece.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The west has lost the power to shape
the world in its own image – as recent events, from Ukraine to Iraq, make all
too clear. So why does it still preach the pernicious myth that every society
must evolve along western lines?

Pankaj Mishra

The Guardian - 14 October 2014

“So
far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the western model,” according
to a new book, The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait
and Adrian Wooldridge. This seems an extraordinary admission from two editors
of the Economist, the flag-bearer of English liberalism, which has long
insisted that the non-west could only achieve prosperity and stability through
western prescriptions. It almost obscures the fact that the 20th century was
blighted by the same pathologies that today make the western model seem
unworkable, and render its fervent advocates a bit lost. The most violent
century in human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for the “bland
fanatics of western civilisation”, as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called them at the height of
the cold war, “who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as
the final form and norm of human existence”.

Niebuhr
was critiquing a fundamentalist creed that has coloured our view of the world
for more than a century: that western institutions of the nation-state and
liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and that the
aspiring middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about
accountable, representative and stable governments – that every society, in
short, is destined to evolve just as the west did. Critics of this teleological
view, which defines “progress” exclusively as development along western lines,
have long perceived its absolutist nature. Secular liberalism, the Russian
thinker Alexander Herzen cautioned as early as 1862,
“is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of
this”. But it has had many presumptive popes and encyclicals: from the
19th-century dream of a westernised world long championed by the Economist, in
which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, to Henry Luce’s
proclamation of an “American century” of free trade, and “modernisation theory”
– the attempt by American cold warriors to seduce the postcolonial world away
from communist-style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer
capitalism and democracy.

The
collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened Niebuhr’s bland
fanatics. The old Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Francis Fukuyama’s influential end-of-history
thesis, and cruder theories about the inevitable march to worldwide prosperity
and stability were vended by such Panglosses of globalisation as Thomas Friedman. Arguing that people
privileged enough to consume McDonald’s burgers don’t go to war with each
other, the New York Times columnist was not alone in mixing old-fangled
Eurocentrism with American can-doism, a doctrine that grew from America’s
uninterrupted good fortune and unchallenged power in the century before
September 2001.

The
terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised
by capital and consumption. But the shock to naive minds only further
entrenched in them the intellectual habits of the cold war – thinking through
binary oppositions of “free” and “unfree” worlds – and redoubled an old
delusion: liberal democracy, conceived by modernisation theorists as the
inevitable preference of the beneficiaries of capitalism, could now be
implanted by force in recalcitrant societies. Invocations of a new “long
struggle” against “Islamofascism” aroused many superannuated cold warriors who
missed the ideological certainties of battling communism. Intellectual
narcissism survived, and was often deepened by, the realisation that economic
power had begun to shift from the west. The Chinese, who had “got capitalism”,
were, after all, now “downloading western apps”, according to Niall Ferguson. As late as 2008, Fareed
Zakaria declared in his much-cited book, The Post-American World, that “the rise of the
rest is a consequence of American ideas and actions” and that “the world is
going America’s way”, with countries “becoming more open, market-friendly and
democratic”.

A world in flames

One
event after another in recent months has cruelly exposed such facile
narratives. China, though market-friendly, looks further from democracy than
before. The experiment with free-market capitalism in Russia has entrenched a
kleptocratic regime with a messianic belief in Russian supremacism.
Authoritarian leaders, anti-democratic backlashes and rightwing extremism
define the politics of even such ostensibly democratic countries as India,
Israel, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Turkey.

The
atrocities of this summer in particular have plunged political and media elites
in the west into stunned bewilderment and some truly desperate cliches. The
extraordinary hegemonic power of their ideas had helped them escape radical
examination when the world could still be presented as going America’s way. But
their preferred image of the west – the idealised one in which they sought to
remake the rest of the world – has been consistently challenged by many
critics, left or right, in the west as well as the east.

Herzen
was already warning in the 19th century that “our classic ignorance of the
western European will be productive of a great deal of harm; racial hatred and
bloody collisions will develop from it.” Herzen was sceptical of those liberal
“westernisers” who believed that Russia could progress only by diligently
emulating western institutions and ideologies. Intimate experience and
knowledge of Europe during his long exile there had convinced him that European
dominance, arrived at after much fratricidal violence and underpinned by much
intellectual deception and self-deception, did not amount to “progress”.
Herzen, a believer in cultural pluralism, asked a question that rarely occurs
to today’s westernisers: “Why should a nation that has developed in its own
way, under completely different conditions from those of the west European
states, with different elements in its life, live through the European past,
and that, too, when it knows perfectly well what that past leads to?”

The
brutality that Herzen saw as underpinning Europe’s progress turned out, in the
next century, to be a mere prelude to the biggest bloodbath in history: two
world wars, and ferocious ethnic cleansing that claimed tens of millions of
victims. The imperative to emulate Europe’s progress was nevertheless embraced
by the ruling elites of dozens of new nation-states that emerged from the ruins
of European empires in the mid-20th century, and embarked on a fantastic quest
for western-style wealth and power. Today, racial hatred and bloody collisions
ravage the world where liberal democracy and capitalism were expected to
jointly reign.

This
moment demands a fresh interrogation of what Neibuhr euphemistically called
“the highly contingent achievements of the west”, and closer attention to the varied
histories of the non-west. Instead, the most common response to the present
crisis has been despair over western “weakness” – and much acrimony over what
Barack Obama, president of the “sole superpower” and the “indispensable nation”
should have done to fix it. “Will the West Win?” Prospect asks on the cover of
its latest issue, underlining the forlornness of the question with a picture of
Henry Kissinger, whose complicity in various murderous fiascos from Vietnam to
Iraq has not prevented his re-incarnation among the perplexed as a sage of
hardheaded realism.

Robert
Kagan, writing in the Wall Street Journal at the
start of September, articulated a defiant neoconservative faith that America is
condemned to use “hard power” against the enemies of liberal modernity who
understand no other language, such as Japan and Germany in the early 20th
century, and Putin’s Russia today. Kagan doesn’t say which manifestation of
hard power – firebombing Germany, nuking Japan, napalming Vietnam – the United
States should aim against Russia, or if the shock-and-awe campaign that he
cheerled in Iraq is a better template. Roger Cohen of the New York Times provides a
milder variation on the clash of civilisations discourse when he laments that
“European nations with populations from former colonies often seem unable to celebrate
their values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law”.

Such
diehard believers in the west’s capacity to shape global events and
congratulate itself eternally were afflicted with an obsolete assumption even
in 1989: that the 20th century was defined by the battles between liberal
democracy and totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism and communism. Their
obsession with a largely intra-western dispute obscured the fact that the most
significant event of the 20th century was decolonisation, and the emergence of
new nation-states across Asia and Africa. They barely registered the fact that
liberal democracies were experienced as ruthlessly imperialist by their
colonial subjects.

For
people luxuriating at a high level of abstraction, and accustomed to dealing
during the cold war with nation-states organised simply into blocs and
superblocs, it was always too inconvenient to examine whether the freshly
imagined communities of Asia and Africa were innately strong and cohesive
enough to withhold the strains and divisions of state-building and economic
growth. If they had indeed risked engaging with complexity and contradiction,
they would have found that the urge to be a wealthy and powerful nation-state
along western lines initially ordered and then disordered first Russia, Germany
and Japan, and then, in our own time, plunged a vast swath of the postcolonial
world into bloody conflict.

History’s long-term losers

The
temptation to imitate the evidently triumphant western model, as Herzen feared,
was always greater than the urge to reject it. For many in the old and
sophisticated societies of Asia and Africa, chafing under the domination of
western Europe’s very small countries, it seemed clear that human beings could
muster up an unprecedented collective power through new European forms of
organisation like the nation-state and the industrialised economy. Much of
Europe had first learned this harsh lesson in political and military innovation
from Napoleon’s all-conquering army. In the century after the Napoleonic wars,
European societies gradually learned how to deploy effectively a modern
military, technology, railways, roads, judicial and educational systems and
create a feeling of belonging and solidarity, most often by identifying
dangerous enemies within and without.

As
Eugen Weber showed in his classic book Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), this was a
uniformly brutal process in France itself. Much of Europe then went on to
suffer widespread dispossession, the destruction of regional languages and
cultures, and the institutionalisation of hoary prejudices like antisemitism.
The 19th century’s most sensitive minds, from Kierkegaard to Ruskin, recoiled
from such modernisation, though they did not always know the darker side of it:
rapacious European colonialism in Asia and Africa. By the 1940s, competitive
nationalisms in Europe stood implicated in the most vicious wars and crimes
against religious and ethnic minorities witnessed in human history. After the
second world war, European countries – under American auspices and the
pressures of the cold war – were forced to imagine less antagonistic political
and economic relations, which eventually resulted in the European Union.

But
the new nation-states in Asia and Africa had already started on their own
fraught journey to modernity, riding roughshod over ethnic and religious
diversity and older ways of life. Asians and Africans educated in western-style
institutions despaired of their traditionalist elites as much as they resented
European dominance over their societies. They sought true power and sovereignty
in a world of powerful nation-states – what alone seemed to guarantee them and
their peoples a fair chance at strength, equality and dignity in the white
man’s world. In this quest China’s Mao Zedong and Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk as much as Iran’s democratically-elected prime minister Mohammed
Mossadegh followed the western model of mass-mobilisation and state-building.

By
then European and American dominance over “the world’s economies and peoples”
had, as the Cambridge historian Christopher Bayly writes in The
Birth of the Modern World, turned a large part of humanity “into long-term
losers in the scramble for resources and dignity”. Nevertheless, the explicitly
defined aim of Asia and Africa’s first nationalist icons, who tended to be
socialist and secular (Atatürk, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Mao, and Sukarno), was
“catch-up” with the west. Recent ruling classes of the non-west have looked to
McKinsey rather than Marx to help define their socioeconomic future; but they
have not dared to alter the founding basis of their legitimacy as “modernisers”
leading their countries to convergence with the west and attainment of European
and American living standards. As it turns out, the latecomers to modernity,
dumping protectionist socialism for global capitalism, have got their timing
wrong again.

In
the 21st century that old spell of universal progress through western
ideologies – socialism and capitalism – has been decisively broken. If we are
appalled and dumbfounded by a world in flames it is because we have been living
– in the east and south as well as west and north – with vanities and
illusions: that Asian and African societies would become, like Europe, more
secular and instrumentally rational as economic growth accelerated; that with
socialism dead and buried, free markets would guarantee rapid economic growth
and worldwide prosperity. What these fantasies of inverted Hegelianism always
disguised was a sobering fact: that the dynamics and specific features of
western “progress” were not and could not be replicated or correctly sequenced
in the non-west.

The
enabling conditions of Europe’s 19th-century success – small, relatively
homogenous populations, or the ability to send surplus populations abroad as
soldiers, merchants and missionaries – were missing in the large and populous
countries of Asia and Africa. Furthermore, imperialism had deprived them, as Basil Davidson argued in The Black Man’s
Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, of the resources to pursue
western-style economic development; it had also imposed ruinous ideologies and
institutions upon societies that had developed, over centuries, their own
viable political units and social structures.

Recklessly
exported worldwide even today, the west’s successful formulas have continued to
cause much invisible suffering. What may have been the right fit for
19th-century colonialists in countries with endless resources cannot secure a
stable future for India, China, and other late arrivals to the modern world,
which can only colonise their own territories and uproot their own indigenous
peoples in the search for valuable commodities and resources.

The
result is endless insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, wars and massacres,
the rise of such bizarre anachronisms and novelties as Maoist guerrillas in
India and self-immolating monks in Tibet, the increased attraction of
unemployed and unemployable youth to extremist organisations, and the endless
misery that provokes thousands of desperate Asians and Africans to make the
risky journey to what they see as the centre of successful modernity.

It
should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to
disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal
democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes. The
political and economic institutions and ideologies of western Europe and the
United States had been forged by specific events – revolts against clerical
authority, industrial innovations, capitalist consolidation through colonial
conquest – that did not occur elsewhere. So formal religion – not only Islam,
Hinduism, Judaism, and the Russian Orthodox Church, but also such quietist
religions as Buddhism – is actually now increasingly allied with rather than
detached from state power. The middle classes, whether in India, Thailand,
Turkey or Egypt, betray a greater liking for authoritarian leaders and even
uniformed despots than for the rule of law and social justice.

But
then western ideologues during the cold war absurdly prettified the rise of the
“democratic” west. The long struggle against communism, which claimed superior
moral virtue, required many expedient feints. And so the centuries of civil
war, imperial conquest, brutal exploitation, and genocide were suppressed in
accounts that showed how westerners made the modern world, and became with
their liberal democracies the superior people everyone else ought to catch up
with. “All of the western nations,” James Baldwin warned during the cold war in
1963, are “caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means
that their history has no moral justification, and the west has no moral
authority.” The deception that an African-American easily divined has
continued, nevertheless, to enjoy political support and intellectual
respectability long after the end of the cold war.

Thus
the editors of the Economist elide in The Fourth Revolution the history of mass
slaughter in the west itself that led to the modern nation-state: the religious
wars of the 17th century, the terror of French revolutions, the Napoleonic
wars, the Franco-Prussian war and the wars of Italian unification, among
others. Mainstream Anglo-American writers who vend popular explanations of how
the west made the modern world veer between intellectual equivocation and
insouciance about the west’s comparative advantage of colonialism, slavery and
indentured labour. “We cannot pretend,” Ferguson avers, that the “mobilisation
of cheap and probably underemployed Asian labour to grow rubber and dig gold
had no economic value.” A recent review in the Economist of a history
explaining the compact between capitalism and slavery protests that “almost all
the blacks” in the book are “victims”, and “almost all the whites villains”.

Understandably,
history has to be “balanced” for Davos Men, who cannot bear too much reality in
their effervescent prognoses of “convergence” between the west and the rest.
But obscuring the monstrous costs of the west’s own “progress” destroys any
possibility of explaining the proliferation of large-scale violence in the
world today, let along finding a way to contain it. Evasions, suppressions and
downright falsehoods have resulted, over time, in a massive store of defective
knowledge – an ignorance that Herzen correctly feared to be pernicious – about
the west and the non-west alike. Simple-minded and misleading ideas and
assumptions, drawn from this blinkered history, today shape the speeches of
western statesmen, thinktank reports and newspaper editorials, while supplying
fuel to countless log-rolling columnists, TV pundits and terrorism experts.

The price of progress

A
faith in the west’s superiority has not always been an obstacle to
understanding the tormented process of modernisation in the rest of the world,
as the French anti-communist Raymond Aron demonstrated in books like Progress
and Disillusion (1968) and The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955). Aron believed
the west made the modern world with its political and economic innovations and
material goals, but did not flinch from examining what this fact really augured
about the modern world. As he saw it, the conflicts and contradictions thrown
up by the pursuit of modernity had been hard enough to manage for western
societies for much of the last century. Industrial societies alone had seemed
able to improve material conditions, and bring about a measure of social and
economic equality; but the promise of equality, which staved off social unrest,
was increasingly difficult to fulfill because specialisation kept producing
fresh hierarchies.

Some
parts of the west had achieved some reduction in material inequalities, due to
a market economy which produced both desirable goods and the means to acquire
them; organised labour, which made it possible for workers to demand higher
wages; and political liberty, which made the rulers accountable to the ruled.
And some western countries had also, however brutally, got the sequencing
broadly right: they had managed to build resilient states before trying to turn
peasants into citizens. (“We have made Italy; now we must make the Italians,”
the Italian nationalist Massimo d’Azeglio famously proclaimed in 1860.) The
most successful European states had also accomplished a measure of economic
growth before gradually extending democratic rights to a majority of the
population. “No European country,” Aron pointed out, “ever went through the
phase of economic development which India and China are now experiencing, under
a regime that was representative and democratic.” Nowhere in Europe, he wrote
in The Opium of Intellectuals, “during the long years when industrial
populations were growing rapidly, factory chimneys looming up over the suburbs
and railways and bridges being constructed, were personal liberties, universal
suffrage and the parliamentary system combined”.

Countries
outside the west, however, faced simultaneously the arduous tasks of
establishing strong nation-states and viable economies, and satisfying the
demands for dignity and equality of freshly politicised peoples. This made the
importation of western measures and techniques of success in places that “have
not yet emerged from feudal poverty” an unprecedented and perilous experiment.
Travelling through Asia and Africa in the 1950s, Aron discerned the potential
for authoritarianism as well as dark chaos.

There
were not many political choices before societies that had lost their old
traditional sources of authority while embarking on the adventure of building
new nation-states and industrial economies in a secular and materialist ethos.
These rationalised societies, constituted by “individuals and their desires”,
had to either build a social and political consensus themselves or have it
imposed on them by a strongman. Failure would plunge them into violent anarchy.

Aron
was no vulgar can-doist. American individualism, the product of a short history
of unrepeatable national success, in his view, “spreads unlimited optimism,
denigrates the past, and encourages the adoption of institutions which are in
themselves destructive of the collective unity”. Nor was he a partisan of the
blood-splattered French revolutionary tradition, which requires “people to
submit to the strictest discipline in the name of the ultimate freedom” – whose
latest incarnation is Isis and its attempt to construct an utopian “Islamic
State” through a reign of terror.

The state under siege

Applied
to the many nation-states that emerged in the mid-20th century, Aron’s sombre
analysis can only embarrass those who have been daydreaming since 1989 about a
worldwide upsurge of liberal democracy in tandem with capitalism. Indeed, long
before the rise of European totalitarianisms, urgent state-building and the
search for rapid and high economic growth had doomed individual liberties to a
precarious existence in Japan. Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and South Korea went
on to show, after 1945, that a flourishing capitalist economy always was
compatible with the denial of democratic rights.

China
has more recently achieved a form of capitalist modernity without embracing
liberal democracy. Turkey now enjoys economic growth as well as regular
elections; but these have not made the country break with long decades of
authoritarian rule. The arrival of Anatolian masses in politics has actually
enabled a demagogue like Erdoğan to imagine himself as a second Atatürk.

Turkey,
however, may have been relatively fortunate in being able to build a modern
state out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire. Disorder was the fate of many new
nations that had been insufficiently or too fervidly imagined, such as Myanmar
and Pakistan; their weak state structures and fragmented civil society have
condemned them to oscillate perennially between civilian and military despots
while warding off challenges from disaffected minorities and religious
fanatics. Until the Arab spring, ruthless despots kept a lid on sectarian
animosities in the nation-states carved out of the Ottoman empire. Today, as
the shattering of Iraq, Libya and Syria reveals, despotism, far from being a
bulwark against militant disaffection, is an effective furnace for it.

Countries
that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist
revolutions – such as China, Vietnam, and Iran – look stable and cohesive when
compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial
nation-states like Iraq and Syria. The bloody regimes inaugurated by Khomeini
and Mao survived some terrible internal and external conflicts – the Korean and
Iran-Iraq wars, the Cultural Revolution and much fratricidal bloodletting –
partly because their core nationalist ideologies secured consent from many of
their subjects.

Since
1989, however, this strenuously achieved national consensus in many countries
has been under siege from a fresh quarter: an ideology of endless economic
expansion and private wealth-creation that had been tamed in the mid-20th
century. After its most severe global crisis in the 1930s, capitalism had
suffered a decline in legitimacy, and in much of the non-western world, planned
and protected economic growth had become the chosen means to such ends as
social justice and gender equality. In our own age, feral forms of capitalism,
which after the Depression were defanged by social-welfarism in the west and
protectionist economies elsewhere, have turned into an elemental force. Thus,
nation-states already struggling against secessionist movements by ethnic and
religious minorities have seen their internal unity further undermined by
capitalism’s dominant ethic of primitive accumulation and individual gratification.

China,
once the world’s most egalitarian society, is now even more unequal than the
United States – 1% of its population owns one-third of the national wealth –
and prone to defuse its increasing social contradictions through a hardline
nationalism directed at its neighbours, particularly Japan. Many formally
democratic nation-states, such as India, Indonesia, and South Africa, have
struggled to maintain their national consensus in the face of the imperative to
privatise basic services such as water, health and education (and also, for
many countries, to de-industrialise, and surrender their sovereignty to
markets). Mobile and transnational capital, which de-territorialises wealth and
poverty, has made state-building and its original goals of broad social and
economic uplift nearly impossible to achieve within national boundaries.

The
elites primarily benefitting from global capitalism have had to devise new
ideologies to make their dominance seem natural. Thus, India and Israel, which
started out as nation-states committed to social justice, have seen their
foundational ideals radically reconfigured by a nexus of neoliberal politicians
and majoritarian nationalists, who now try to bludgeon their disaffected
subjects into loyalty to a “Jewish state” and a “Hindu nation”. Demagogues in
Thailand, Myanmar, and Pakistan have emerged at the head of populations angry
and fearful about being deprived of the endlessly postponed fruits of
modernity.

Identified
with elite or sectarian interests, the unrepresentative central state in many
countries struggles to compete with offers of stability and order from
non-state actors. Not surprisingly, even the vicious Isis claims to offer
better governance to Sunnis angry with the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
So do Maoist insurgents who control large territories in Central India, and
even drug-traffickers in Myanmar and Mexico.

A shattered mirror

Fukuyama,
asserting that the “power of the democratic ideal” remains immense, claimed
earlier this year that “we should have no doubt as to what kind of
society lies at the end of History”. But the time for grand Hegelian
theories about the rational spirit of history incarnated in the nation-state,
socialism, capitalism, or liberal democracy is now over. Looking at our own
complex disorder we can no longer accept that it manifests an a priori moral and rational order,
visible only to an elite thus far, that will ultimately be revealed to all.

How
then do we interpret it? Reflecting on the world’s “pervasive raggedness” in
the last essay he wrote before his death in 2006, the American anthropologist
Clifford Geertz spoke of how “the shattering of larger coherences … has made
relating local realities with overarching ones … extremely difficult.” “If the
general is to be grasped at all,” Geertz wrote, “and new unities uncovered, it
must, it seems, be grasped not directly, all at once, but via instances,
differences, variations, particulars – piecemeal, case by case. In a splintered
world, we must address the splinters.”

Such
an approach would necessarily demand greater attention to historical
specificity and detail, the presence of contingency, and the ever-deepening
contradictions of nation-states amid the crises of capitalism. It would require
asking why nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq failed catastrophically
while decentralisation helped stabilise Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim
country, after a long spell of despotic rule supported by the middle class. It
would require an admission that Iraq can achieve a modicum of stability not by
reviving the doomed project of nation-state but through a return to
Ottoman-style confederal institutions that devolve power and guarantee minority
rights. Addressing the splinters leaves no scope for vacuous moralising against
“Islamic extremism”: in their puritanical and utopian zeal, the Islamic
revolutionaries brutally advancing across Syria and Iraq resemble the fanatically
secular Khmer Rouge more than anything in the long history of Islam.

A
fresh grasp of the general also necessitates understanding the precise ways in
which western ideologues, and their non-western epigones, continue to “make”
the modern world. “Shock-therapy” administered to a hapless Russian population
in the 1990s and the horrific suffering afterwards set the stage for Putin’s
messianic Eurasianism. But, following Geertz’s insistence on differences and
variations, the ressentiment of the west articulated by nationalists in Russia,
China, and India cannot be conflated with the resistance to a predatory form of
modernisation – ruthless dispossession by a profit-driven nexus of the state
and business – mounted by indigenous peoples in Tibet, India, Peru and Bolivia.

In
any case, the doubters of western-style progress today include more than just
marginal communities and some angry environmental activists. No less than the
World Bank admitted last month that emerging economies – or the “large part of
humanity” that Bayly called the “long-term losers” of history – might have to
wait for three centuries in order to catch up with the west. In the Economist’s
assessment, which pitilessly annuls the upbeat projections beloved of
consultants and investors, the last decade of rapid growth was an “aberration”
and “billions of people will be poorer for a lot longer than they might have
expected just a few years ago”.

The
implications are sobering: the non-west not only finds itself replicating the
west’s violence and trauma on an infinitely larger scale. While helping inflict
the profoundest damage yet on the environment – manifest today in rising sea
levels, erratic rainfall, drought, declining harvests, and devastating floods –
the non-west also has no real prospect of catching up with the west.

How
do we chart our way out of this impasse? His own discovery of the tragically
insuperable contradictions of westernisation led Aron into the odd company of
the many thinkers in the east and the west who questioned the exalting of
economic growth as an end in itself. Of course, other ways of conceiving of the
good life have existed long before a crudely utilitarian calculus – which
institutionalises greed, credits slavery with economic value and confuses
individual freedom with consumer choice – replaced thinking in our most
prominent minds.

Such
re-examinations of liberal capitalist ideas of “development”, and exploration
of suppressed intellectual traditions, are not nearly as rousing or
self-flattering as the rhetorical binaries that make laptop bombers pound the
keyboard with the caps lock glowing green. Barack Obama, who struggled to
adhere to a wise policy of not doing stupid stuff, has launched another
open-ended war after he was assailed for being weak by assorted can-doists.
Plainly, Anglo-American elites who are handsomely compensated to live forever
in the early 20th century, when the liberal-democratic west crushed its most
vicious enemies, will never cease to find more brutes to exterminate. The rest
of us, however, have to live in the 21st century, and prevent it from turning
into yet another rotten one for the western model.